IQNA

TEHRAN (IQNA) – Head of the Iranian Medical Center for Hajj Pilgrims said 400 types of medicines and medical equipment needed to provide medical services to Iranian Hajj pilgrims will be sent to Saudi Arabia next month.

Mohammad Taqi Hellisaz told IQNA that the needed medicine and equipment, weighing 60 tons in total, have been purchased and are ready to be sent to the Arab country.

Elsewhere, he said although the Hajj season is still a few months away, the Medical Center for Hajj Pilgrims started planning for providing health and medical services to Hajj pilgrims in January.

He added that some 570 physicians have been selected to be dispatched to the kingdom for the Hajj season.

The quota agreed by Saudi Arabia for Iran’s pilgrims in the 2019 Hajj is 86,500.

Iran sent 86,000 pilgrims to Saudi Arabia for Hajj in 2018. In 2017 some 85,000 Iranians made the pilgrimage.

A year earlier, more than 1.8 million pilgrims attended Hajj but Iranians stayed at home after tensions between Riyadh and Tehran boiled over following a deadly crush of people during the 2015 pilgrimage.

On September 24, 2015, thousands of people lost their lives in the deadly crush after Saudi authorities blocked a road in Mina during a ritual, forcing large crowds of pilgrims to collide.

The crush was the deadliest incident in the history of the pilgrimage. According to an Associated Press count based on official statements from the 36 countries that lost citizens in the disaster, more than 2,400 pilgrims were killed in the incident.

Saudi Arabia claims nearly 770 people were killed, but officials at Iran’s Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization say about 4,700 people, including over 460 Iranian pilgrims, lost their lives.